The Association of Small Bombs(75)

Vikas appeared to listen earnestly, attentively, releasing one hand from the paper, which sagged into his lap, the free hand massaging his chin. Then he got up and walked out of the house.



Deepa’s anger at her husband grew. She didn’t know what to do. That’s when she visited Mukesh again.

Mukesh, sitting in his office, still dolefully managing construction sites for a living, had been waiting. From behind his glass doors, he had been following the distant eruptions in the Khuranas’ marriage, noting the frequency of Vikas’s exits, his chancy drumming gait as he fled the house, his late returns in the evenings. He knew the marriage was at its end. He was an invigilator of grief—a realist. He knew, unlike the rest of the people in the complex, who confused optimism with high-mindedness, that no matter what Vikas and Deepa did, their marriage could not recover. Nothing did from a bomb.

He had seen the crater left by it when he had gone to the market soon after the blast. It had taken his breath away, given him vertigo, and his mind had circled the ditch with its lacing of trash blended in with the roots of a tree trying desperately to hold on to sinking soil.

When Deepa came to his office one morning, looking frighteningly thin and worked up, he was sympathetic and placid again; he listened to her talk about the construction the neighbors were doing, which disturbed Anusha.

It was in the anger that Mukesh saw the first shoots of life in Deepa.

Then, one day, when Vikas was out, Mukesh went over to the entrance to the house and rang the bell. The dour Nepali servant answered and led him up the cracked stairs into the drawing room. Deepa sat tense in a plain white salwar, clutching her own wrists.

She welcomed him in with a thin smile and offered him tea.

Mukesh was in there for an hour making faces at Anusha, who had come into the room, excited to see her chachu, who gave her dates and candies whenever he saw her. “What a little princess,” he said to her in his disturbingly sexual manner.

“Show uncle your Ajooba dance,” Deepa said.

Anusha was oddly obsessed with this Bachchan movie from the 1990s, and Mukesh, sitting there in his white pants, clapped. There was something perverse about how joyful this child was, he thought. It would have been better if she were morose. Her joy only outlined the tragic background. It brought out the sickness in the yellow walls, the groans emitted by every off-center painting and troubled spot of seepage on the walls.

Mukesh knew from Deepa’s face that he was being watched too, carefully.

“How is the money situation?” he asked suddenly.

“Good,” she said, but in a way that made it clear she had whispered a thousand bads before it.

“So Vikas is finishing his film about markets?”

Another pause. “Yes.”

“Good.” Mukesh smiled, bending down from his chair to do a card trick for Anusha: he always carried a pack of cards with him, fanning them in concert with his lecherous grin.



His visits became more frequent. He would come up in the middle of the day and play with Anusha; Deepa would watch him. Then, one morning, when Anusha was at her play school, Deepa led him into the bedroom and took off her clothes.

Mukesh looked on from the door, hard, amused. Her nakedness made him aware of his own clothes: a checked half-sleeve shirt, loose gray pants, black Batas.

She sat down on the bed, her buttocks on the sheet, and began to read a gray dusty book titled The Magic Mountain, which she lifted from the side table.

Mukesh sat down on the sofa in the room, clutching and mopping his brow. Now that he had what he’d wanted—now that he was so close to it—he had a mind to turn back.

After a while, he got up as if to leave, but then turned around and, still fully clothed—this is how he liked to do it—climbed onto the bed.



It was not love—what happened. Though she had opened herself to him in that bed, on that morning, she was not aroused when he speedily covered her body with his.

It was as if she would only let him have her by pretending to be dead.



Their passion took on the flat quality of those mornings with their archipelagoes of white light thrown on the floor, the bones of the windows visible and gaunt, Mukesh coming over and rummaging around in her life, her bed—she never thought of it as sex, but as rummaging.

She had long since evacuated the sphere of full feeling. In some ways Vikas had been right about her after she’d come back from visiting Malik—she was gone. What remained was a bright shadow, a disturbance of light intent on going on a little longer.



The trouble started when she began to fall in love with Mukesh, as she looked forward to these illicit visits, imagining the imprint of his hands on the old wooden railing that ran alongside the staircase—the hands with their blisters from breaking and peeling branches with Swiss knives on trips to Dalhousie; hands that dragged the sliding door at the entrance to the drawing room so it hung, like a man taken by the throat, a few inches above its rail on the ground.

That’s when she asked him for money.

That had been the implicit agreement from the start—that he would give her money for Anusha; he had offered it after the first visit as he buttoned up his shirt and put on his brutal black shoes: the patriarch getting dressed before his family, entertaining petitions. And they never once talked about his wife and two grown-up daughters. “I should go pick up Anusha,” she had said after that first time, still half-smiling, half-radiant, abashed, touching her hair, confused, scared. She too knew she had crossed a threshold and, having done it, could not say why. It was not out of attraction—she had no physical feelings for Mukesh, disliked his breath, disliked even the tender, consoling way he had held her, as if putting her in a hypnotic lock before committing his act—no, she felt only a warping stasis, the desire to be rid of a station of life, no matter the method or means. And Mukesh, with his kara-cuffed arms, his triple-ringed fingers with their superstitious ruby insets, his almost synthetic mustache, his filigreed eyes, was such a means—had become complicit with her mission even before she’d set out on it. So she’d let him play his part.